I'm gonna prove to you that Jesus loves war and a good cartoon butt-stabbing as much as the rest of us.
This is George Baker's early style. He was a real cartoonist. Pure and full of honest humanity.
I always liked his work. Gritty, funny, manly, ribald and to the point.It got a lot more stylish as time went on and I find it really interesting to see how it started.
This early stuff is more conservative - almost a standard Mutt and Jeff sort of style, but it hints at something new.
It shows no signs of inbreeding.
Like most pure cartoonists, Baker thinks feet are funny. Especially backwards feet.
Besides being able to draw funny feet and square buttocks, George Baker was really good at continuity.
His strip is mostly pantomime. Good cartoon storytellers are able to tell their stories without words. I feel like an idiot having to say that. That should be an A priory principle of cartooning; it's part of the definition of what a cartoon is.



This is really an all-American outlook.
I miss cartoons being cartoons. I keep waiting to see if animated features will ever have a cartoonist's outlook and style. It seems to be against the law to make animation that reflects a cartoonist's viewpoint. It's bizarre to me that it never happens, when there is obviously such a huge audience for it. Normal people love cartoons.





I read the intro in the book and found out that Baker worked for Walt Disney before the war! Luckily for cartoon fans, he managed to maintain his own style after leaving the house of marrying your sister.
Jesus is an American and he thinks war and latrines are hilarious too! Maybe He is a cartoonist as well.

I love seeing the progression of a talented cartoonists' style. When I was a kid, I bought all the Harvey Comics' Sad Sack books, just for George Baker's covers. Unfortunately the insides were mostly drawn by a very generic boring artist, but the covers were wildly stylish.


He was very good at drawing scenes from slightly high angles, looking down on his characters.


As his cartoons became more and more angular, he still maintained a gruff kind of regular joe feel to his work. He didn't become stylish to prove he was high class. I think his style just evolved naturally, a bit at a time.



Watch how the dog evolves over time...




Great use of composition and hierarchy!

The dog always show off Baker's talent for mixing high stylistic license with solidly thought out perspective and construction.
His vehicles were fantastic!

Aren't these beautiful? - in a manly, chunky gritty way?

I've struggled in the animation business with all the controls and systems set in place to stop styles and regular characters from evolving naturally. Many producers think it's a sin for characters to ever change and they make huge model sheet binders filled with arbitrary constrictions to clamp down on any individuality or inspiration, or just plain stop the process of slow natural evolution. Studios beat this into their cartoonists, until they finally get to the point where they are afraid to let their natural feelings or personality guide their drawings.

The other extreme is when young cartoonists think they need to express their unique personality through an artificially created personal "style". This usually consists of skipping the steps of learning basic drawing skills in general and going right to copying someone else's already established style superficially or or doing a slight variation of a school of style. This also gets in the way of natural evolution and the ability to express one's self.